Seminar: Being a toolsmith researcher: a constructive approach to science of tools?
- Date: Feb 4, 2025
- Time: 02:30 PM - 04:00 PM (Local Time Germany)
- Speaker: Jun Kato
- Location: Max Planck Institute for Human Development, Lentzeallee 94, 14195 Berlin
- Room: 316
- Host: Center for Humans and Machines
- Topic: Discussion and debate formats, lectures

It has been a while since computers enabled "new media" -- computer scientists and engineers have made new tools on computers that reinterpret existing media practices and sometimes leverage new forms of media expressions. Over the past decade, Jun has led the development and deployment of such tools, designed for creativity support in the domain of programming, video authoring, and anime storyboarding. Such a long-term commitment has allowed him to build a reciprocal relationship with creative culture, to learn highly contextualized insights, and then to uncover generalizable knowledge about the design of computer tools. In this talk, Jun will briefly walk-through his past projects and discuss how such a constructive approach in Human-Computer Interaction would contribute to a new scientific study of tools.
Dr. Jun Kato is a senior researcher at AIST and a technical advisor at Arch, Inc. in Japan. He is currently a visiting scientist at Université Paris-Saclay. He has conducted research in Human-Computer Interaction (HCI), in particular, building and deploying creativity support tools in the wild as a "toolsmith researcher", which regularly resulted in academic recognition such as Honorable Mentions at ACM CHI (2013, 2015, 2023)and IPSJ/ACM Award (2021).